


kingdom come undone

by jolt



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Canon Compliant, Friends With Benefits, M/M, Pining, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:08:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25757122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jolt/pseuds/jolt
Summary: When he called you up this morning, breathless, to explain that he’d flown in ahead of his team to visit his family, your first instinct was to pretend not to understand what he was asking.Iwaizumi and Oikawa on a work night. When casual things stop being casual.
Relationships: Iwaizumi Hajime/Oikawa Tooru
Comments: 6
Kudos: 28





	kingdom come undone

When he called you up this morning, breathless, to explain that he’d flown in ahead of his team to visit his family, your first instinct was to pretend not to understand what he was asking. 

“I’ve got a full day,” you’d said, sighing deeply to signal that you were busy.

“Come on,” he pleaded eventually. You pictured him falling dramatically into a plush armchair. “We haven’t hung out in  _ so long _ !”

And that tone of voice has never given you any room to deny it - you’re just as helpless against it now as you were when you were nine. 

For a moment, you’re tempted to plot the ways every tiny surrender dating back to childhood has led you here, to this upscale boutique hotel in Shibuya on a work night. 

Oikawa glitters under the lights of the hotel bar. The metal oblong fixtures shimmer with white gold that casts him in a spotlight, a soft halo that offsets the cold of your surroundings - chocolate leather seats, mahogany tables, metal accents. 

You take a deep breath and move forward, darting around the other tables, feeling stupid, as if you both decided to pretend this is the first time you’re seeing each other tonight. The discretion is an illusion. In reality, told him you’d meet him down here because for once he got dressed quicker than you did, and he didn’t point out the absurdity of meeting downstairs at the bar when you were both coming from the same room just like you didn’t point out the absurdity of being in the same room in the first place. 

Something shatters when you finally take your seat across from him, on the chair because he always claims the booth. Things are simpler, in the dim quiet of a hotel room, after all the years of skirting around each other. Out in the open, the gaps are clearer. The behavior is more measured. A tightrope that always stretches out in front of you after these encounters, a clear demarcation: _before,_ _after_. Your ability to stay casual is a bargaining chip. _Trust me enough with this_ , it says, _I can handle it_. So you offer him a smile and he returns it easily. He’s as unfairly stunning as ever and it hits you - suddenly and far too late - just what a mistake this was. 

It’s then you notice the drink waiting for you on the table, a pint of beer sweating rivulets of condensation onto an expensive-looking marble coaster.

“I went out on a limb and ordered for you,” Oikawa explains with a self-conscious laugh. 

“Yeah, that’s fine. Thanks,” you say, lifting the glass to your lips, feigning confidence when you feel his eyes tracking your movement.

“I’m really not supposed to drink, you know,” Oikawa says, sipping something dark with a lime wedge balancing on the rim of his glass. 

Bemused, you answer, “I know.” And then, because you can’t help yourself, “You probably shouldn’t be up late either, if you want to shake the jet lag before your exhibition games start.”

A quick laugh. “Well, last time I checked, you weren’t my trainer. But thanks for the tip.”

If you were younger, he would have teased you about trying to be his mother. It’s merciful, probably, that he doesn’t resort to that now. Besides, you are not, in fact, his trainer - so you drop it.

“So what’s new? How’s work?” Oikawa asks with a wan smile. He folds one leg over the other, bending again so he’s sitting on his ankle.

“I’ve been busy,” you say, answering both questions at once. Then, for emphasis, you gesture around the room, decorated as it is in tiny Japan flags strung tastefully along the walls. The television above the bar is broadcasting some news segment about the women’s synchronized swimming pre-qualifiers.

“You know, I can get your parents tickets to any game they want,” Oikawa says, settling his chin in the heel of his hand. 

The offer unhooks something in your brain, gratitude giving way to suspicion and then to something worse - some malicious, festering hope. “Oh yeah?” you say, coming untethered. 

Oikawa leans forward on the table, drink dangling from his hand, light refracting in the etched crystal glass. “It would be my pleasure. I’d be so happy if they came to watch me play. Just let me know what game they want to see and I’ll talk to our ticketing liaison.” 

Still smothered by the gesture, you force yourself to say, tightly, “Yeah, I’m sure they’d really enjoy it. Thanks.”

Oikawa sits back in his seat. “You don’t have to be all cagey,” he says, dramatically rolling his eyes. Then, with a wave, “I just want to do something nice for your parents.” He says this with a lot of nonchalance for a guy who was riding you not an hour ago. Oikawa never does anything in half measures. 

You take a deep breath, imagining your mother’s voice when you tell her.  _ Tooru’s still such a wonderful boy. So thoughtful. Isn’t he thoughtful? _

_ Yes, ma _ .

“I’ll let them know.” You force a thin smile, and that seems to satisfy him enough to drop it. Honestly, you don’t know what you were thinking.  _ Please stop offering nice gestures to my parents, it’s confusing _ ? You sound like a lunatic.

It’s like this every time.

It’s always, always like this. 

You lose the plot. You drop the ball. You forfeit your one and only bargaining chip.  
  


The first time Oikawa sat on your dick and ground his hips obscenely, you had thought, with all the insularity of your nineteen-year-old brain, that you’d seen god. That this was rapture and he reached out his hand and chose to take you along with him. There was never a benevolence as true and as agonizing as Oikawa’s. The scope of your world suddenly changed, warping and folding in on itself until you could suddenly hold it in your hands. That was your salvation, that it was Oikawa. 

Not long after that, you promised you would never make this hard for him, that you’d never ask more of him than he could rightfully give you from across the world, that you’d never be the agent of guilt.  _ “We’ll do this for as long as it’s fun and not weird, right?” _ Right.

Really, the last time you hooked up should have been the last time. 

Oikawa had been visiting his parents at the end of his team’s season, and you were newly-twenty five and green on your first real contract, with the Sendai Frogs. Feeling like there was nothing you couldn’t do. Feeling like an adult for possibly the first time. He invited you over when his folks were out and, with little preamble, led you to his childhood bedroom, of all places. You would have thought the familiarity of everything would have been a comfort. Instead, it drove you crazy to the point of self-immolation because you couldn’t stop imagining yourselves in this situation years earlier. Like you were trying to relive the memory of something that never happened. Like you were trying to swallow the experience whole, until it became a part of you by osmosis.  _ This is how it would have happened if we were seventeen: his parents would still be at work and we would be here after practice and and and _ . It was too much. Revisionist history. If it had happened back then, things would be so different now. Was that a good thing or a bad thing?

It was too much.

This crater opened in your chest, cracked your ribcage clean in two and just started expelling everything inside of you, like a fire hydrant with the cap knocked off, and you didn’t know where to put it all. It was showing on your face, what being in that room was doing to you, so plain it was with love and anguish. Hemorrhaging love. You didn’t know where to put it all. 

You felt, with horror, all those secrets spill forth without your permission, without you even realizing it. They trickled out of your mouth as you descended to press open-mouthed kisses to his sternum, flew from your hands as you clutched at his hips like a lifeline, bled from your eyes as tears collected like dew on the pillowcase when you buried your face in it so he couldn’t look at you properly. Like they were a cancer your body was rejecting. Nowhere to go but out.

This is why you nearly stayed in California, you thought at the time. This is why you wanted to disappear in the tree-blanketed mountains, recede into the tide, bank hour upon bleeding hour at the clinic, work with American athletes, players of some innocuous sport that didn’t remind you of home. Basketball, maybe. 

You didn’t want to be so obvious about it. You didn’t know where to put it all. But it was too late. You didn’t have to say anything and neither did he. Pretty soon, he was flying back over the Pacific and you were still in Sendai.

It was around this time that Matsukawa looked at you with a quizzical expression and said,  _ Casual doesn’t work for everyone _ . At the time, you wanted to insist that all the two of you have ever been is  _ casual _ . Your body and his. Your life and his. Entangled from the start, easily and thoughtlessly together. Casual. 

Hanamaki, who back then was toying with the idea of becoming a therapist, had added,  _ Maybe you should reconsider what you let him get away with _ . 

You were so upset by that assessment that you told him to fuck off and sulked all the way home and neither of them brought it up again. 

  
  


And now all it takes to bring you to the brink of unraveling altogether is an offer for free tickets that you could probably get yourself, if you asked the right person. 

Desperate to say something that won’t alienate you any further, you ask, “So how does it feel? Being an Olympian?” 

Oikawa doesn’t answer for a moment. Something in his eyes shutters and then reopens, a shift so fast it might as well have been a trick of the light. “It feels,” he finally says, “like I’m about to conquer the whole world.”

He starts talking about his team then: their initial practices, the backup setter who reminds him of Yahaba, some promotional photoshoot they did the other day, all with the caveat that  _ you’re not spying on me for your team, right? _

Listening to him talk is riveting, even if he (as usual) leaves few opportunities for you to inject with questions, opinions, stories of your own. He talks through two more rounds of drinks and the feeling you have is sharp - of not wanting to leave his side, of wanting to be the person he comes to with anecdotes before he’s perfected them to tell at cocktail parties. You want all his rough drafts. You want all his edges.

The feeling hasn’t lessened, but it’s duller now, less immediate than it once was. The very urgency that used to propel you forward in an attempt to keep up has been replaced by patience. Forgetfulness. The older you get, the less you remember, and maybe that’s a small victory in some way. The more you want to make up for lost time. The more you feel yourself living in lost time.

Every peek behind the curtain he gives you casts a haze over you, bone-warm and dreamlike, until you realize that if you don’t leave right now, you might do something embarrassing. Like ask to stay with him.

“I should head out. I have an early start tomorrow,” you explain, getting up to settle the bill.

“Ah, okay,” Oikawa answers with a hiccup, reaching up to touch your wrist before you go find the waitress. 

When you get back to the table, Oikawa’s demeanor has changed again, closed, like he knew you were scouring for scraps and there was only a finite amount he could give out before it started to hurt him too. Lost time slows just long enough to get a good look at him. He looks like an Olympian, you think, and you don’t have a choice about the pride clawing up your throat, it’s there, fully-formed, proof of the years spent building a shrine you don’t know how to pray at anymore. You could tell him. It’s at the tip of your tongue. Where else are you going to put it. 

He stands, and you two make your way through the bar towards the lobby. “If all goes well, we play Japan in the third round,” Oikawa says, and you’re absurdly thankful that he’s taking the reins of the conversation again, even as it’s petering out.

“Let’s hope you make it that far.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about us making it. It’s your team I’m worried about.”

The laugh that startles out of you feels like a demon being exorcised from your chest. 

Oikawa stops walking when you’re just a short distance from the entrance to the hotel, the automatic doors sliding open on the night air as people pass by. He breaks the spell first, but that’s okay. This is where you part ways. “I’ll see you around then, Iwa-chan,” he says. 

“Yeah, see you,” you answer, unsteady, shoving your hands into the pockets of your jeans. “Maybe we’ll run into each other in the Olympic Village.”

The armor cracks. Oikawa’s smile is a sunbeam breaking the clouds, a direct line to god. You want to reach up and climb it.  _ What’s the view like from up there _ , you wonder. “I’ll look for you,” he says, and you catch such a clear glimpse of the boy you fell in love with that your teeth ache. 

He doesn’t reach for you, and that’s okay too. You flex your hands inside your pockets until the urge to reach out for him subsides. 

You thought once that you’d be crushed under all the love you have for him. 

It’s maybe why you go into all your dates with a foot already out the door.

It’s maybe why you worked through four years of undergrad, three years of interning under Utsui-san during grad school, and then three years bouncing around the V-League all so you could get good enough to land a job on the Olympic team. 

It’s maybe why, when Oikawa first told you he’d been naturalized as an Argentinian citizen, you knew you had to shut the tiny door you’d kept open since high school. That holding onto unbridled hopes was a much younger person’s inclination. You knew that if you didn’t, it would be harder when you woke up, years later, and realized it was too late.

If nothing else, it makes parting ways slightly easier. The marble floors shine with the slick of having been recently polished, and the ambient lighting dripping from the chandeliers is both warm and uninviting in the way hotel lobbies tend to be. Transient spaces. Not a place anyone intends to stay. 

“Good night,” Oikawa tells you, and half his body is already angling away, already a step closer to the bank of elevators, ready to dash off the moment you set foot out the door.

“Good luck, Tooru.”

His eyes search yours for a moment. Eventually, he says, “You too.”

When you step out into the street, letting the night consume you, the ache that settles over you keeps you company the whole way home.

**Author's Note:**

> Let me just say that I was so in love with the way Haikyuu ended, but I have dumb bitch disease that makes my first instinct to just write pure, unadulterated angst. Luckily, my second instinct is to pair it down until all that's left is this self-indulgent second-person POV unresolved emotional tension. 
> 
> I tried very hard not to make Oikawa come across as a villain here (or just, like, evil and manipulative and intentionally cruel) - not least of all because it's just not plausible. I just wanted to write something that would capture how much of a goner Iwa is for him and the agony of that against the impossibility of their situation, ETC, but know that in my head Oikawa feels the same way but they both are trash communicators and keep it all bottled up in second person narratives.
> 
> Full disclosure, I listened exclusively to folklore while writing this.


End file.
